


the things we carry

by glitteratiglue



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Character Study, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Steve Rogers Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-17 22:15:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4683347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glitteratiglue/pseuds/glitteratiglue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve carried his dreams into a war and came out the other side without a scratch or bruise, with a heart riddled with holes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the things we carry

**Author's Note:**

> All my feelings about Steve Rogers; sorrynotsorry.

_"Dreams do come true, if only we wish hard enough._

_You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it."_

**_-_ J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan.**

* * *

Steve was always a dreamer.

Sick in bed as a child, he devoured the classics: _Peter Pan, Treasure Island, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea._ When he read those stories, he wasn't small and poor, stuck in a skinny, sharp-boned body that didn't fit him. He soared beyond constellations, swam in deep waters, shot arrows and fought pirates with a strength he'd never had.

Finding him poring over a book at the breakfast table, Steve's ma would ruffle his hair and tell him that pirates still had to eat. In the years since his father died, it had been harder to make ends meet and she worked longer shifts at the hospital, coming back late with tired, tired eyes.

He drew pictures of fantasy worlds and fairytale characters and slipped them in the pocket of her nurses' uniform, wanting to remind her that she could still dream. Sarah Rogers kept every one of those drawings, and years later in an empty apartment, Steve would find them in a box in her wardrobe.

As the years rolled by, he still read and dreamed, but it got harder to live in his fantasies whenever he went back to school after a bout of illness and the boys taunted him for being a sissy. So he started to fight them. It was easy at first, even when it hurt, because he could kid himself he was like those heroes in the books, fighting their way out of any scrape with tenacity and courage.

Steve grew up tiny and angry and frail, with a chip on his shoulder the size of Texas.

His old dreams fell away and made way for new ones: the hope that he could be tough enough to make his way in the world. Steve took every bruise and scraped knuckle and black eye and wore them like badges of honour. He told himself it didn't matter that he didn't have a single person to share those honours with.

One day, he picked a fight with a dark-haired boy who hadn't done a thing to him, just to see what he would do. The boy knocked him into the dirt with one punch and when Steve came up swinging, he dodged his right hook with ease and stuck out a hand to help him up.

“I like you, kid,” he said. “I'm James, but everyone calls me Bucky. _Not_ Jimmy.” Bucky's face split into a dimpled smile, and his eyes were bright and eager when he looked at Steve.

That day, Steve saw that Bucky Barnes was a dreamer, too; he had to be.

He looked deeper, saw that the boy with light in his eyes, who smiled so easily was a boy who barely had a minute to himself, who worked odd jobs on weekends and delivered papers before school, who sat hunched over his desk, trying not to yawn when the teacher rapped on the wood with a ruler.

With a mother who worked herself to the bone in a textile factory, no father to speak of and three younger sisters who relied on him, Bucky could have been hard and cold, all compassion bred out of him from the need to survive. Steve had seen it often enough in the downturn, the grinding poverty that took the fight right out of people and left them powerless.

That wasn't Bucky: he was better than that. He could always find it in himself to smile and laugh, and dream. He shared his dreams with Steve as easily as he shared slices of his mother's pound cake and his pulp science fiction magazines, like it was nothing to give away little pieces of himself.

Dreams were Bucky's way of having something for himself outside of the jobs he hated, the little girls he adored and complained about in equal measure, and the mother he worried about far more than he would ever let on.

Most nights, they would sit on the roof, and Bucky would tell him how one day he was going be rich and make enough money that his ma and sisters would never have to worry again. On those nights, when they felt the air rushing through their hair and the breeze on their skin, Steve believed.

He believed in Bucky, the boy with rough edges and the biggest heart.

Hearing those simple, honest dreams, Steve felt ashamed of his own, his childish storybook fantasies of being stronger and heroic. At home, money was sometimes tight, but he'd never known the crushing responsibility of holding so many lives in his hands, in a world where life was cheap and you made every hard-won dollar with your sweat and blood.

Bucky was so used to carrying everyone around him that he'd never thought to resent it. Steve wasn't strong enough to carry much, but he would carry Bucky. That much he could do.

Steve did what he could. He brought his old storybooks round and delighted Rebecca, Dorothy and Evelyn Barnes by reading them the swashbuckling tales and adventures that had got him through those long, lonely years. He dictated his school notes to Bucky in the mornings, in between tying hair ribbons and settling squabbles at the breakfast table. Winifred Barnes would look on fondly, pinning up her hair for work with tired eyes. Sarah Rogers started coming over on her days off to give Bucky's ma a break, and it was good like that, for a while.

Except, Steve stayed small and angry, and that chip on his shoulder got bigger as Bucky shot up and filled out, got picked first for sports teams and started taking out girls. These days, Bucky wanted to be Clark Gable, would spend ages with a comb and Brylcreem in front of his cracked mirror. He stuck pictures of Hollywood starlets all over his bedroom wall and talked non-stop about beautiful dames and fast cars.

But underneath all the bravado and the posturing, Steve still saw a boy who dreamed and made dreams for others. Bucky would flip through Steve's sketchbook and grin, saying he couldn't wait for the day when Steve was a famous artist and they could both live a life of luxury.

On long winter evenings, when Steve's chest was so tight he would pull on a towel tied to the bed, Bucky would sit beside him and tell him how good things would be when they could move away - somewhere warm, maybe a small town, away from this polluted city of light and noise and darkness. Steve knew it was a pipe dream, but he listened, mesmerised.

He let Bucky weave his dreams for both of them; it was easier that way. They left school and Steve found clerical work in between bouts of sickness, and Bucky, a succession of decently-paid factory jobs and dock work. It wasn't the stuff of their childhood fantasies, but they were surviving in a world that didn't leave much room for weakness, and that was a victory in itself.

Watching his mother succumb to the illness she'd spent her life nursing others through, Steve wanted to scream, because he'd never been strong enough to hold anyone together, not even himself.

He should have counted on Bucky. Throughout those long months, when Steve measured time in every blood-slick cough and rattling breath from his mother, Bucky was there. He read to Sarah Rogers on her good days, and dragged Steve out of the house for a movie or an ice-cream on her bad days, when Steve's strength was down to the last inch.

The day his ma stuttered her last breath, that little boy who dreamed of pirates and wizards died, too.

After, Bucky kept close to Steve, kept faith, kept steady for him, like he always had. For the second time in their lives, he stuck out a hand and Steve took it.

It was the first dream they'd ever made a reality, their tiny apartment up four flights of stairs that smelled like boiled cabbage, too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. And they grabbed it with both hands, the first bit of anything they'd had just for themselves.

Most days, Steve found himself looking at Bucky's hands, his smile, and thinking _what if?_ It was the most dangerous dream he'd ever had, and he couldn't remember ever wanting anything more.

A few nights, when Bucky had too much to drink, he would kiss Steve in a way that burned him under his skin and left him panting. Steve wanted more: to touch, to have everything, but he knew he couldn't. The next day, it was always forgotten.

They were kids, too afraid and selfish to admit they might have had everything they ever wanted.

But then came the war and that slip of paper with Bucky's name on it. Steve should have known it was too good to last. He watched the light go out in his friend's eyes, could see every dream he'd ever had going up in flames like the cheap paper the draft slip was printed on.

It was the cruelest thing, to think that Bucky's nightmare was his dream.

The failed enlistments stung, just like Bucky's letters telling him that he'd got in for the NCO training, that it would mean more money for his ma and the girls. Maybe he hadn't wanted to go, but the city boy from Brooklyn had apparently proved to be a crack shot with a rifle, could throw a grenade with steady hands and keep a cool head under pressure. Steve couldn't help but remember those sure, swift hands braiding a twist into Dottie's hair at the kitchen table. Those same hands would now bring death and destruction, but that was war, he supposed.

Bucky had new dreams, dreams he couldn't be part of, and they burned in Steve's throat when he read the letters out loud to himself. All the same, perhaps Bucky would want those old dreams someday. Steve clutched them to his chest, kept them safe just in case.

Time fell from under Steve's feet like quicksand, and then he wasted their last night together on chasing that impossible dream; it didn't ease his conscience, the fact that it paid off.

His strange new body felt like payback for all those times he wished he was someone else; be careful what you wish for, he knew that. He woke every day feeling like that small boy in his childhood bedroom, fighting for every breath, because he didn't fit into that body then, and he sure as hell didn't fit into this one, either.

Steve carried his dreams into a war and came out the other side without a scratch or bruise, with a heart riddled with holes.

He lived in Bucky's letters, read between the falsely cheerful lines to see the bigger picture; he was always cold, tired and scared, like any soldier.

One day, the letters stopped coming.

Azzano and the factory were a blur. But finding the dreaming boy from Brooklyn strapped to a table, with the fight gone out of him: Steve remembered that part, crystalline sharp.

He found a man with hollow eyes, with a body covered in bruises and collapsed veins from the bite of needles, who had forgotten how to laugh. It was Bucky, sure enough, but there was something hard and cold inside him - the absence of those little pieces of himself he would never get back. He'd once shared those pieces of himself with Steve so freely, but there was a difference between what you gave willingly and what was taken from you.

There were scars on the inside of Bucky, now. Steve wore them under his skin too, because for once, he was strong enough to do that for Bucky, to wear his pain like it was his own.

Steve never told anybody how he sneaked away one night while the rest of the 107th made camp, out into the darkness of the frozen forest. Too far away for anyone to hear, he screamed and wept for his friend, for the dreams that war had taken from them both.

Bucky had become a man who no longer talked about his dreams. Steve understood why, and he would keep Bucky's dreams close for the both of them. He thought about their vow to make money, get out of New York one day, about those three little girls and their mother, waiting every day for news. He remembered his own ma, and part of him was glad she hadn't lived to see this.

They were not boys any longer; war makes men out of hell and screams and death.

Their time as prisoners brokered a free pass out of the war for Bucky and the others. Steve wanted to tell Bucky to never look back, to stumble home and let the devoted smiles and laughter of his sisters knit his broken soul back together. To make some kind of a life for himself out of dead dreams and patchwork scars.

Instead, Steve held out a hand and asked him for everything he was, for the rest of those little pieces of himself. Bucky gave them without question, took his hand and followed the star on the back of Captain America's shield like a guiding light.

He saw the trust between him and the other Commandos, remembered that before he was on the scene, Bucky was theirs, too. It hurt, to think that he belonged to someone else these days.

In time, Steve learned to see the best in all of them. Dugan kept them laughing, Falsworth with his dry wit kept them sane. Jones and Morita were the sarcastic, barbed thorns in their sides, and Dernier was the steady compass that pulled them onward. Steve listened to them talk about their dreams, of farms and families and businesses and women. Sometimes he thought he wanted those things, too - a life with Peggy, a family - but then, his dreams had always been tied up with what Bucky wanted.

They were all brothers, and Steve carried them, the way he'd once seen a boy from Brooklyn carry all those lives in his hands. He carried them because he could, made it his personal mission to get each and every one of them back home, back to their dreams in one piece.

Steve got hold of an old copy of _Peter Pan_ in London and gave it to Bucky. Bucky teased him -“Aw, Steve, what am I gonna want with some kid's book?”- but he read it anyway, and saw what it meant. There were dreams between those pages, but more importantly, belief and the idea that you could go on living when you lost those dreams.

Bucky started to believe again. He'd always believed in the shield, in Steve, but he started to talk of old dreams, of making their way out of this someday. They'd take a trip somewhere warm: California, Mexico and maybe the Grand Canyon, too.

Steve hung on to those modest dreams like a drowning man, and they were enough.

Until the train. Time spilled from between Steve's fingers, the years falling away like water, roaring in his ears. Right back to the dark-haired boy from Brooklyn, who gave so much to others and kept what little he could for himself.

When the plane went down, Steve held Peggy's picture in his hand and Bucky's dreams inside his heart.

His eyes opened on a future with no purpose for him. He was the boy who never grew up, Peter watching through the open window and seeing the things that he would never have.

Steve looked into the past. In his mind's eye, he could see that skinny, angry boy on the other side of time and wanted nothing more than to be him again, to take it all back.

He had nothing, nothing but an ounce of fight left in him, and he wasn't sure that was enough. Just like that scrawny, sickly kid who read books in his bedroom, Steve drew on his heroes, and he fought with the dim hope that if he could cancel out injustice and end suffering, then he would find peace.

In their capital city, he thought that he was starting to find it. The man with kind eyes, who knew what it was to lose the other half of yourself, he understood. Sam smiled and laughed and never pushed for more than Steve was willing to tell him. There was a lot of that boy from Brooklyn in him; that same mischievous spirit. In time, maybe it would be enough.

When Steve watched the Winter Soldier's mask fall and saw the face that looked back at him with cold, dead eyes, time slowed down to the thump of his heartbeats.

He threw his shield into deep water for the boy with a head full of dreams and came out the other side bloodied and bruised on a riverbank.

Steve chased the trail for months until it went cold, and he figured it was another dream he would have to give up on.

There was a book left on his windowsill one night: _Peter Pan_. He read it, cried for the first time since he left the hospital, and hoped against hope that it meant something.

A week later, the boy with dark hair and a metal arm dropped through his bedroom window in the middle of the night, swift and silent as a cat. His eyes were remote, guarded, but he looked tired, limbs heavy with bone-deep exhaustion. He didn't say a word, just lay down and went to sleep on Steve's bedroom floor.

Steve watched Bucky all night. He was struck by the fact that this machine of war and death had a face in sleep that was soft and boyish, because he was still so young. They both were, though ice had taken decades from them that they would never get back.

The next day, Bucky moved into Avengers Tower and gave himself up to a battery of tests and psychological evaluations. He started to put the pieces of himself back together. Steve wanted to carry it all for him, but this time, he knew he couldn't.

Bucky had a story all his own, and it wasn't the same as Steve's. If their dreams had once been tied up together, now Bucky had to find new ones for himself.

Steve had no idea how to help him there; all his dreams had gone down in Arctic ice and died there with him.

It took time and pain, but Bucky clawed his way out of the battered shell of himself and set to building something in its place. Sam was a steady presence, reminding them both at every turn why it was worth living this life when so much had been taken from them.

And they had friends, this ragtag group of heroes who were somehow just as broken as they were. Natasha, who laughed despite the darkness inside her, and Tony, the joker who held everyone together with fierce loyalty, while pretending there was nothing in his heart but shrapnel scars. Thor's easy-going nature belied the wisdom of thousands of years, the pain and loss written behind his eyes that he had long ago learned to hide. There was Bruce, who knew what it was to feel like a monster, and Clint, the boy from the circus who had built a life for himself, but had never forgotten what it was to be unmade.

Steve had come to love them all. In time, they loved Bucky, too, saw the goodness of the man who was old and young at the same time, who had lost so much but still got up every day and tried to atone for the things he had been made to do.

One day, Steve found Bucky with photos of Becca, Dottie and Evie clutched in his hands, weeping. They had become women while he was gone, wives and mothers with their own children and grandchildren. Long dead. Steve watched Bucky stare at those photos, his chest heaving with the loss. He thought of the two boys who went to war and never came home, of those sweet, fierce girls and the mother with two gaping holes in her heart, who had to go on living just the same.

They were not boys any longer; they were men out of time, broken toy soldiers. But they had to go on living.

Living was power. It was a defiance for both of them, to step forward into the light and embrace the borrowed time they were never supposed to have.

Steve would take it anyway, every piece, because Bucky was there beside him.

Months later, he looked up and saw that old light in Bucky's eyes, the heat behind his smile. Steve felt the years rushing back, all the times he'd wanted what he could never have. He kissed Bucky and it was like muscle memory; his lips were as warm and pliant as he remembered and the kiss broke him just the same as it always had.

That night, they took the things they'd wanted from each other since they were stupid kids in that walk-up apartment. They took them without fear, without hesitation, with selfishness and need.

For the first time, Steve let himself be brave enough to love the man he'd loved nearly all his life. He could be everything for Bucky, could give him the heart that wasn't exactly whole - all patched up and rent with scar tissue - but he could give him that, and it would be enough.

Maybe there would be missions and dangers to come, in a world that needed them more than they wanted to admit. After all, they both knew what it was to serve.

But now, Steve had something to come home to: Bucky, and the stack of classic children's novels beside their bed. They read the stories from their youth, saw their dreams in the pages and began to think of new ones for themselves.

They talked about the Grand Canyon, and that little house in a small town they'd dreamed of back when Steve was sick and fragile. Perhaps one day they would go and visit Bucky's surviving relatives, when they had the words to explain and the heart to let them in. In their future, there would be new places and new wonders to see, but they kept their old dreams safe and precious, because they remembered how it felt to lose them.

Steve was ninety-seven when he learned how to dream again, with the dark-haired boy at his side who'd never really left him.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't even know what this is, but writing it broke me into so many little pieces. These boys are going to be the death of me.


End file.
